[instead of theorists, for a change. For everyone who thought the worst thing about Billygate was being embarrassed in front of your European friends, here's the antidote, from today's NYPress.]
International Politics BY JIM HOLT
I was lingering over an absurdly expensive luncheon with the Countess Ghika at the Cafe de la Paix, across from the Opera. A bit of mis-aimed lipstick lent color to the Countess' left cheek.
"You have some nerve to goad me about American politics," I was saying to her. "Politicians in the United States behave no more foolishly or disgrace*fully than those of your adoptive coun*try, France."
After all, I pointed out to her, President Clinton had only been on trial for telling a few fibs. In Paris, a former prime minister, Laurent Fabius, was about to be prosecuted along with two of his cabinet members for *homicide*. In the 80s, it was alleged, their negligence had resulted in thousands of hemophiliacs receiving infusions of HIV infected blood. A more recent French head of government, Alain Juppe, had just been acquitted -- by the skin of his teeth -- of embezzlement by a court in Versailles, but he continued to face other corruption charges. A third erstwhile prime minister -- Edith Cresson, famous for her amusing pronouncement that most Englishmen were pansies -- had also landed herself in the soup through shady dealings. Meanwhile the buf*foonish Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the National Front, had been tem*porarily banned from politics for trying to punch a Socialist opponent, who happened to be a woman.
The Countess was evidently annoyed by this Intelligence. She looked as though she had just bitten into an unripe persimmon.
"But at least the French allow their politicians to have a private life," she rejoined. "We were all so moved by the spectacle of Mitterrand's mistress and his wife standing side by side over his grave."
Oh, honestly. If one wanted to make an argument for the inseparability of public and private character, one could do better than to cite the case of that old fraud Mitterrand, whose political and personal lives came together In one seamless, duplicitous whole. He lied about everything, from his extra-matrimonial wanderings to his wartime involvement with the Petainist government in Vichy to the cancer that ultimately did him in. His opportunistic ideological turnings -- from Catholic conservative to colonial repressionist to bogus Socialist -- made Bill Clinton look like a paragon of unwavering principle. He even, I reminded the Countess, went so far as to stage a phony assassination attempt on him*self in the 60s to boost his career.
"Ah, yes, I have heard of that incident," the Countess said. "Rue Guynemer," she added, referring to the street where Mitterrand claimed to have encountered his would-be assassins, whom he eluded by majestically leaping over a fence into the adjoining Luxembourg Gardens.
"Perhaps," she continued, "the moral of all this is the politicians do not really differ from nation to nation. They are universally odious."Here was a conclusion I could almost agree with. Most politicians suffer from a personality defect -- the itch for power -- that renders them social misfits. Grasp that, I told the Countess, and you have the root of the matter. They enter politics in order to compensate for their feelings of inferiority. That is why most intelligent Americans, or Frenchmen, are hard-pressed to think of a single politician they actually like. The Countess nodded gravely and took a sip of her porto. (What an awful old boozer she is.)
But there are two experiences that can redeem a politician, I continued. One of them is dying and coming back to life. This is precisely what just happened to Jean-Pierre Chevenement, France's interior minister. A few months ago, while under anesthesia for a gallbladder operation, Chevenement suddenly went into a coma. For over a week he was unconscious, hovering on the brink of death. Then he miraculously snapped out of it. "I have dallied with the beyond," he commented on returning to government last month. And then this formerly emollient Socialist minister began saying the most outrageous and amusing things, shaking everybody up, calling suburban slum youths -- most un*Socialistically -- "little savages." It was like the movie Bulworth. Having glimpsed eternity, he could speak his mind.
The other thing that can redeem a politician, even render him likable, is complete hopelessness. Take George McGovern: In 1972, knowing that he was about to receive an electoral thrashing of historic proportions, poor McGovern was trying to give a speech somewhere in Michigan. A young fellow in the front row wearing a Nixon button was heckling him loudly and incessantly. But then McGovern leaned over the stage and whispered something into the ear of the heckler, who suddenly fell silent. Afterward a reporter approached the young man and found out what McGovern had said to him. He had said, "Listen, you son of a bitch, why don't you kiss my ass." He was redeemed.
So that was my theory of politiicians, I told the Countess, who had affected to drop her monocle on hearing the salty language. Recovering her composure, the aging vixen went on the offensive again. "My dear, I'm surprised to hear that you have a 'theory' of anything. You are not an intellectual, after all. You are merely a hedonist."
"I wish you wouldn't call me a hedonist," I said. "It produces such a bad effect on the minds of people who don't know Greek."